


Hawkins Pilgrims Club

by Jonagorgon



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 07:52:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15702990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jonagorgon/pseuds/Jonagorgon
Summary: The kismetic confluence of couth youth and their jaunty campaign to savor all things delightful amidst the turmoil stemming from the Mind Flayer being a real jerk.





	Hawkins Pilgrims Club

1984 - November 4th - 5:15pm

 

The perpetually preyed-upon Will Byers, who consistently rolled zeroes in the D&D adventure called ‘Life’, whose hair flowed like chocolate over a fondue fountain, was conked out and supine in a hospital bed inside a partially cleared-out office in Hawkins Lab. The wall opposite the bed was aglow with the fragmented stare of a weary sun sinking behind skeletal trees in the distance, and there was an olfactory mélange of paper, binders, wooden shelves, and mild disinfectants in the room.

A never-not-concerned Joyce Byers was watching Will breathe and fiercely biting on her left index fingernail that, if sentient, prehensile, and in possession of a white flag, would most certainly be waving it. A wired Mike Wheeler was in a bathroom next door doing handstand push-ups on the toilet. A restless Bob Newby was probing various drawers, managing to find eight pairs of scissors. He meticulously layered them on both hands and raised them triumphantly, turning to Joyce with a high-watt smile.

“Hey Joyce, need any coupons cut?” inquired Bob, chuckling. His smile quickly vacated.

Joyce, struggling to keep a swelling wave of tears from breaking, staggered over to Bob.

“Hold me,” Joyce mewled, as the aforementioned tear wave broke onto her cheek shores.

Bob looked at his scissor hands dejectedly and then up to an expectant Joyce.

“I can’t,” he said. “Look, Joyce, I have to head over to Radioshack tonight. There’s a bunch of new product displays I have to set up, and I can only do it after-hours. As soon as I’m done, I’ll come back over and check on you guys, ok?”

“Fine, Bob, whatever. Go. We don’t need you here, anyway,” said Joyce as she turned, walking toward the bed with an exasperated sigh.

“Are you angry that I have to go to work, Joyce? Because that’s _totally_ sane, you know.”

“Just go to RadioShack, Bob. Hook up batteries to wires and clamp them to your nipples or whatever it is you do there. You obviously don’t care about me or Will.”

“Christ, how’d you know hook up ba—Jesus, Joyce! Why can’t I just date someone who is slightly more emotionally stable than a drunk toddler? Someone I don’t have to worry about offending _all_ the darn time. Or, heck, just someone who doesn’t look worried constantly. Because I gotta tell you, it’s not much of a turn-on seeing that distressed look on your face while I’m making sweet love to you.”

“Get out, Bob!” Joyce shouted. “I don’t love you, and I _never_ did! So, just go!”

“Fine, I’m going. We’re still doing movie night tomorrow though, right, babe?”

“GET! OUT!”

“God!” exclaimed a frustrated Bob, storming out of the room into the fulgently lit hallway, dragging the pairs of scissors on his hands against the walls, sending several lab employees diving to the ground, their eyebrows leaping northward on their faces.

Mike, upon hearing the uproar, lost his balance on the toilet and fell to the tiled bathroom floor with a yelp. "Damn you all!" he shouted.

“Mom?” said an awakened and perplexed Will. “What’s going on?”

“Oh honey, it’s nothing,” said Joyce with a slight wince. “Bob’s in one of his moods again. How’s the bravest boy in the world feeling?”

“Super,” deadpanned Will. “I have these alleged scientists torturing me with a blowtorch, the Mind Flayer is hunting me down in earnest with a pack of ravenous dogs, and we’re out of fruit roll-ups at home except for the stupid grape ones. Never been better.”

“My name’s Will!” said Joyce in a mocking lilt, making wild hand gestures. “I’m the only one who suffers distress and hardships in life and screw everyone else’s feelings, because mine are more important!”

“Damn right,” said Will. “Do you have some ‘ludes in that pharmacy you call a purse, mother dearest?”

“Enough to fill a gumball machine, honey,” said Joyce with a smug grin. “But that Halloween candy is for mommy.”

 

* * *

 

6:42pm

 

_Expectoration. Expectoration._

“What is? How’d my hair get this long? What? Where am—”

_Expectoration._

“ **Stay close, darlin’. We’re getting out of here.”**

“Huh? Wait, is that?“

_Expectoration._

“Mike Wheeler and…what’s his name…What’s wrong with them? Oh God, I can’t look.”

_Expectoration._

**“This way.”**

 

* * *

 

8:10pm

 

The headstrong and swarthy Lucas Sinclair had told Max Mayfield, Dustin Henderson, and Steve Harrington to collectively suck it, because he'd rather be feeding his arcade game addiction than contracting a tetanus infection at a junkyard, waiting to be viciously ravaged by a Demodog. He was confident that Dustin would not be making any moves on Max, because Dustin had no moves. Lucas surmised that Max couldn't possibly be wooed by an exhibition of wildly malformed dentition, regardless of simultaneous glottal manipulation.  
  
He had on a copper suede jacket, covering a light turquoise turtleneck, tucked into midnight black jeans, crowning a pair of mocha cowboy boots.

He rolled his head around on his neck to stretch after succumbing to the inexplicably violent subterranean denizens of Dig Dug, his net worth another twenty-five cents lower. There was a cacophony of synthesized beeps and boops emanating from the rows of phosphorescent-faced golems which were tattooed with fantastically vivid promotional artwork inviting you to send your silver coins clinking down their intestines into a treasure chest you would never open to make a valiant foray against an implacably binary foe, whose most important job, Lucas believed, was to teach you how to develop cunning strategies and hand-eye coordination in order to overcome innate weakness in yourself—the real foe.

Lucas tried not to think about the hypocrisy of his parents' outlook that video games were a complete waste of time, while the four-plus hours of television they watched a day, that required no serious cognitive effort, that existed solely to coddle you, cradle you, and make you feel comfortable enough to sit through advertisements for products you allegedly need, were somehow a wiser time investment. Unlike with arcade games, this battle with his parents would never lead to a satisfying victory, for their thinking was, in a way, more hard-coded than any game software, the first and only stage unbeatable.

He made his way to the side exit to take a meandering stroll outside as an intermission from his gaming marathon and to rip open a bag of gummy octopuses he had in his back pants pocket. Near the door, he noticed an unknown girl pinning a flabbergasted Keith up against a game cabinet and kissing him with substantial force. Lucas raised his eyebrows momentarily at the sight before exiting the humid arcade.

The autumnal air outside felt refrigerator cold, with a circus midget’s breath of a breeze gliding through it, striking the perspiration on Lucas' temples with an icy punch. The sky was charred, stars out like search party flashlights looking for a jailbird sun. The towering arcade sign in the parking lot was incandescent and abuzz, spinning with a centripetal pull on kids' hard-earned allowances.

A malcontented Billy Hargrove slammed his driver-side Camaro door in the parking lot and walked toward Lucas, revealing a furious mien. Lucas sighed wearily. Billy was wearing a puffy, dark charcoal cardigan, sleeves rolled up, unbuttoned, exposing a silk, black tie patterned with red and pink roses(red-to-pink rose ratio roughly five to three), on a white dress shirt, tucked into relaxed, onyx dress pants, resting on fringed, umber moccasins.

“Hey! Sinclair! I don’t want your kind hanging around Max, you hear me?” Billy fumed. “I know you’re into her whole skater-punk-Anne-of Green-Gables thing, but stay away, Gilbert! If I see you with her again, you’ll be meeting the mayor of Poundtown. Me! And just to clarify, I mean you’d be getting a beating. Now, I’d be the mayor of Beattown, but that sounds more like a sort of idyllic hip-hop paradise and I’m trying to cultivate more of a rock-and-roll patina. Shall we review? Talk to Max again; subsequent beating.”

“Just admit that you’re a racist, Billy! You don’t want me hanging out with Max because I’m black!”

“Wow, Sinclair, are you really that obtuse? Rhetorical question! You want to know why you inspire my ire?”

“….”

“Unrhetorical question!”

Lucas sighed, rolling his eyes. “Yes, Billy, do tell.”

“You’re a sheep hater.”

“A say what?”

“You have a penchant for shearling jackets, and you also eat burgers at McDonald’s. I have a television set, Sinclair. Two all sheep patties? And then you have the temerity to parade their fluffiness around on your jacket? Deplorable. That’s not the kind of person I want Max fraternizing with. She is, after all, my half-sister, and I cherish her dearly.”

“Billy, I think you misheard the McDonald's commercial. It’s two all-beef patties, not all-sheep. Also, my jackets aren’t genuine shearling, they’re synthetic. Furthermore, I don’t eat mutton, so I’d say my impact is quite benign concerning the ovine.”

Billy squinted his eyes ruminatively, looking down the street lined with sodium streetlights, automobiles ephemerally coruscant with their ginger gaze.

He remembered a warm, late-summer morning in the living room of his former home in California, where a twenty-inch cathode ray tube television set was resting on a small, single-drawered brown oak stand, screen frenetic with a block of psychotically cheerful advertisements, the single speaker sonically filling the space with tinny treble. The beige walls were infested with paintings of sheep grazing in verdant fields, brush-stroked and hung by the incontrovertibly better half of his original parenting duo, illuminated radiantly by the adolescent daylight.

The carpet had a brown-brindled, preemptively-stained-looking pattern, which Billy had convinced a credulous Max was the result of the previous tenants’ defecation habits. A floral-patterned off-white couch and loveseat were postured in an L behind him. Two windows on the east wall were open, allowing a zephyr to ferry the fragrance of perky lemon trees outside into the room through white, sheer curtains that occasionally swelled and receded like lungs.

Billy was wearing a pair of ruby-colored swimming trunks and a white crop-top with cut-off sleeves, standing with his legs shoulder-wide, facing the television, gripping a knurled-handled chrome dumbbell firmly in his right hand and a book less firmly in his left-- _The Shining_. He was performing a set of bicep curls, inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth sharply with a ‘ _puh_ ’ plosive after each operose contraction, which accompanied a clinking of the weight plates as the dumbbell impacted his pectoral at the apex of the arc. The busy bicep looked like a Russet potato under his well-tanned, sweat-glossy skin, embraced by a reticulation of sapphire veins and capillaries. The rhythmic repetitions made the junk in his trunks swing like a grandfather clock pendulum. He turned pages with his left thumb deftly.

A McDonald’s commercial was playing with a harmonic choir cheerfully belting out hamburger ingredients, and Billy was fairly confident that he heard ‘ _all sheep patties_ ’, inducing him to glance up from his book to the TV with a worried frown. Bringing the dumbbell up for another full bicep contraction, he murmured ‘ _deplorable_ ’ with significant strain and a brisk exhalation, trembling drops of perspiration occasionally detaching from his face and making pencil eraser sized dark dots on the pages of his book.    

“You know, Billy, we could just go on a curiosity voyage to the library and clear this up. I’m sure there’s a book there about McDonalds with in-depth information on how they source their ingredients. Want to go with me?”

Billy stepped closer to Lucas, towering over him. “Sinclair, you are so—

Thoughtful! I would be delighted to go to the library with you.”

They high-fived exuberantly.

 

**(Start - 'Metric - Help I'm Alive')**

 

Suddenly, there was a loud slapping sound of flesh hitting the pavement, as a Demogorgon jumped down from the roof of the arcade. He was wearing crimson fingerless gloves.

“Well, don’t you two look delicious?” said the Demogorgon with a flamboyant lilt, gamboling toward Billy and Lucas.

Lucas cursed under his breath, imagining a bleak afterlife sans video arcades and sweet gummy candy, his body fizzing with emergent adrenaline. Billy stood transfixed, silently bidding adieu to his somatic spark, which, in that moment, was burning with an excruciating luminosity, colors all around him just a little more rich and deep to eyes afraid to close.

 

 


End file.
